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At first glance, hardly anyone believed that Francisco Franco could become a authoritarian ruler capable of imposing a ruthless dictatorship for 40 years. He was a small-statured, high-pitched military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero charisma. However he accomplished precisely that, prior to passing away naturally in a Madrid hospital, 50 years ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

Nowadays, Franco acts as a caution that superficial averageness is not an obstacle to the extremely driven. Behind the dull facade lay a elusive, clever strategist. Franco's ambition was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to brutality and limitless self-esteem.

His admirers and defenders – among them on the newly buoyant extreme right in the Spanish nation, the United States and the United Kingdom – continue to assert Franco was never really a dictator, but rather a cherished saviour from Marxism. This is incorrect, but autocrats do not arise from thin air.

"Some important part of any society is made up of people who desire authoritarian rule," French political theorist Jean-François Revel observed the following year Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Truth of Brutality and Suppression

Of course, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the 500,000 fatalities of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people later.

He seized control in a Spain still slumped in post-empire lethargy – a mighty empire having vanished the previous century. Franco wanted to make Spain great again. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, conspiring against it as part of a conspiracy theory, or corrupting local thoughts with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, Marxist doctrine, and his strange obsession, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. The reimagined nation also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and subservient women, whose rights to their bodies, offspring, employment and possessions were reduced, postponed, or handed over to male relatives.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a straitjacket of autarky and threw away the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. International investment and products were avoided. "We have everything we need," he said.

Starvation and Isolation

However, this was incorrect. The direct outcome was famine, with people dying on city streets in 1940 and 1945. While traveling on a triumphal journey through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his allies, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By backing Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he declined to relinquish power later. Spaniards descended deeper into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

Franco's conviction that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "thick fog of self-satisfaction", blind to his own incompetence. Fortune, and a lack of any definable ideology, came to Franco’s rescue. When the cold war started, he burnished his opposition to communism and the United States restored his reputation.

Consequently, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. During the sixties, Spain was drawn into a southern European economic boom that had started long before in neighboring countries. Suddenly, visitors were flocking to Spanish beaches at Benidorm or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the money they sent home after emigrating to northern Europe also helped.

Authoritarian Control and Forgotten History

Franco quietly dropped his most foolish concepts – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but did not relinquish his central aim of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup onwards, implemented a rigid, Goebbels-inspired media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were schooled in a deeply traditional and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. As late as the 1970s, independent political parties, free and fair elections and trade unions remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, deeming them incapable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his heritage was that so many accepted this.

Return to Violence and Medieval Execution

Once that fear-based agreement finally began to fall apart during the last decade of his rule, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, execution teams and even that medieval form of execution, the garrote, reappeared. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a convict's throat and tightened until it broke their neck or stopped their breathing; it was being used by a western European government on its population, during the seventies.

Anxiety and Democratic Change

However, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco biographer, recalls feeling sad as a child, upon learning that Franco had passed away: "The sadness of that youngster was shared at the time by millions of Spaniards, who believed that the man who had just died had been the optimal answer for a country that was difficult to govern," he wrote. "This was the narrative at educational institutions, in the press, on the television … "

The predominant sensation in reaction to Franco's death was fear. After all, what occurs after the figure at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Authority was transferred to the young king Juan Carlos, who oversaw a period of change that ended with a referendum on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. The country continues as a dynamic, disputatious democracy.

Inspiring Stories and Distorted Heritage

Inspiring accounts emerged to account for this. For the left, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, students and workers who fought continually with riot police. For the right, it was a sign of institutional prudence. For Francoists, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it forms part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. At the Madrid copy shop where I printed out versions of my recent book on the dictator, the leader, the proprietor kept maintaining that his parent stated he had prospered under Franco. His parent recalled, of course, only the prosperity of the 1960s.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the problems described by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. University students inform me that their secondary educators were still skirting around the subject recently. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a huge worry.

Lack of knowledge is dangerous. It is not surprising that nearly 20% youth think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to end the quiet and educate young Spaniards what Francoism was really about.